Workbook on Digital Private Papers > Arranging and cataloguing digital and hybrid archives > Arranging and cataloguing emails
Arranging and cataloguing emails
How are emails different to paper correspondence?
- Incoming mail is often organised in a very structured way, but outgoing mail is frequently unsorted and simply stored in a single sent mail folder.
- Ongoing exchanges of correspondence mean that any one message can also contain an extensive record of previous emails. Whilst this information is useful in documenting an extended correspondence, it can be confusing for anyone who was not involved in the exchange: e.g. correspondents might include a received email in their reply and insert comments at various points rather than sending their responses as a single block of text.
- Whilst most organisations keep copies of outgoing hard-copy correspondence, the same is not necessarily true of individuals. When using email, both outgoing and incoming mail are automatically retained. Sent mail can often be preserved in record strings as well as stored in the sent folder.
- Identities (email addresses) are likely to be less fixed than correspondence addresses.
- Dating is much more precise: sent, received and other dates are recorded, often down to the minute and second.
- It is more likely with email than hard copy that messages will be sent to multiple recipients.
- Sheer quantity of material: in many ways its speed has meant that the email message has replaced the telephone call as an informal mode of contact; this means that far more messages are likely to be preserved in an email directory than in a hard copy filing system.
- This informal status means that much more information about an individual and their varied networks is preserved; many people use a single email directory for both business and personal contacts.
- Emails are likely to have a wider range of attachments than the kind of enclosures included in hard copy mail. These attachments form an integral part of the electronic message and often pose separate preservation challenges of their own.
- It is possible to retrieve blind copies from sent mails, whereas it is very difficult to identify blind or illicit copies in paper correspondence.
- During the course of their work an individual is likely to join many distribution lists and listserves; they are more likely to retain these kinds of group mailings than hard copy circulars, and these can tell us something of their interests and spheres of activity.
- Individuals usually maintain a contacts list or address book as an integral part of their email directory; this can give us further important information about their networks.
